This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Kliuless? Gaming Industry ICYMI #4

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutras community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Hi, my name is Kenny Liu, and I work in Revenue Strategy at Riot Games. Each week I compile a gaming industry insights newsletter that I share with other Rioters, including Riot’s senior leadership. This edition is the public version that I publish broadly every week as well. Opinions are mine.

"There are no billion-dollar movies anymore. There are no billion-dollar books or TV series or radio stations. There are no billion-dollar billboard companies. The top 10 games are all over a billion dollars. To start with, if you want to be in any form of content, by far the largest business you could fantasize, that you could ever achieve something in, is games. It’s the world’s biggest revenue source for IP today"

"Today, a whole list of things is happening. The movie industry has fully embraced Unity. Disney’s produced a three-episode series of shorts in Unity. Most every major motion picture company is experimenting with the benefits of instant real time 3D as opposed to waiting two weeks to see a daily when there’s a special effect involved. The movie industry is clearly going to be disrupted by Unity"

Whenever someone asks me to simply explain the gaming industry to them, I always default to saying that it is really the intersection of two very different industries: technology (left-brained) and entertainment (right-brained)

Straddling this left and right brain divide is very hard, and there is no proven formula to consistently pump out blockbuster games

However, game developers have found success walking down paths that either lean to the left or right:

Left: Epic Games, for instance, has invested heavily in their Unreal Engine over the years, and have been able to both monetize their underlying tech as well as build amazing games on top of it

Right: Other successful game developers, like Blizzard as an example, deeply invest in and benefit from highly resonant IPs to drive game sales

As film and TV industry revenue growth stagnates generally, it is only natural for entertainment companies to leverage their already amazing IPs to establish beachheads in the rapidly growing gaming sector, and Unity is but one of the types of landing crafts they will use to ferry across

Related: Spider-Man sells 3.3M+ in 3 days, claiming title of "fastest-selling first-party PS4 game" from God of War

Take-Two CEO: Game streaming’s latency problems will be over in a few years

[KL: Opinions on streaming have varied between Activision Blizzard, EA, Microsoft, and Ubisoft. Even if streaming is enabled by technology in the near future, the more important factor likely will be how soon Microsoft/Nintendo/Sony would pivot away from their current plans. Only two years after the PS3 released, Sony began concepting the PS4, which was eventually released in 2013. Fast forward five years to today, and one can assume that both Sony & Microsoft would likely have incurred significant sunk costs in developing their respective next-gen consoles. Given Microsoft's current market position though, they would be the most likely to accelerate streaming R&D]

[KL: Another interesting example of China's transition to an innovation economy, but in film]

"Next Gen isn’t an American film. But you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s American. It’s from China, based on a comic from a Chinese forum, produced by Alibaba Pictures and Wanda Media. And yet… it doesn’t quite feel like a Chinese film. It looks like something out of Pixar. It features a bunch of well-known American actors like John Krasinski and Michael Pena. Its main character has a Chinese name... but it’s pronounced wrong. The film is even debuting in the US before China"